Social media allows users to connect with like-minded people or to connect with people providing information and opinions of interest to the user. For example, TWITTER is a social media platform that allows users to send short messages, called “tweets,” to other users. Users tweet about many topics, some personal and some related to business, products or politics, for example. The tweets from any sender are electronically distributed to select other users based on preferences of those other users, who may be said to “follow” the sender.
Sometimes, followers of a user pass on information from that user to other users. The information may be passed on as a retransmission of a message from that user. Retransmission is sometimes said to be a “retweet.” Though, the information may be passed on in a new message, which may be correlated with the original message because it may mention the user who originated the message.
It has been recognized that some users of social media are of more interest to others, and may have more followers than others have. Accordingly, the “follower count” of a user, representing the number of followers that user has, is a metric that is sometimes tracked. The follower count has also been called “influence” of a user. To support identifying users with large “follower count,” a social network platform may maintain logs of messages sent by users. These logs, sometimes called “tweet logs,” may be made available for others to analyze and possibly identify users with high follower count. Though, analyzing this information has been problematic because of the large number of tweets and, therefore, the large amount of the data set to be analyzed.
This follower count is important for those seeking to distribute messages—which may be commercial messages—through social media. Accordingly, advertisers may focus their messages on users of social media with large follower counts in the hope that the user will initiate a favorable message that will ultimately reach a large number of that user's followers.
Using this information, trends have been derived from social media tweets. For example, by identifying users with high follower counts, and determining the topics of their tweets, information about topics of interest to users of the social media platform have been identified.
It is also known to compute for users of social media a metric indicative of the “authority” of the user. The authority of a user has been computed based on traffic statistics relating to messages sent through the social media platform.